Back in my college days at the University of Montana, one of my roommates and I came up with a great idea we called the “Nacho Booth” for football games.

The idea spawned from us laughing at some of the comments made by a woman Kirk brought to a Grizzly football game with us one Saturday. This woman was well versed in soccer and lacrosse, but she had never seen a football game before.

She called it “American football.”

As she was trying to understand the game that can be quite confusing, she made us laugh with some questions that were 100 percent serious. When a Grizzly player was flagged for a late hit, she said, “So, does he get a yellow card or something?”

It was a fair question since there are no penalty yards in soccer, but it still made us spit out the beverage we snuck into the stadium.

Really, it was refreshing to hear such an honest take on the sport that everyone else always just pretends to understand. It was refreshing to hear so much common sense, and there is a serious shortage of such thinking in the sport.

Football is not always easy to explain to people. There are so many goofy things. Like, why does an offense get rewarded with the stoppage of the clock because a pass falls incomplete? Why do you get a “free kick” after a “fair catch?”

Why do they call it “football” when the game is played mostly with hands, and why can’t anybody figure out exactly what a catch is or is not?

I’ve been married for more than 21 years, and my wife still does not understand the concept of a “first down.” I have not even tried to begin to explain the “tuck rule” that screwed over the Raiders and launched the most annoying dynasty in the history of sports.

The funniest moment of the woman watching the football game with us came after one of the teams unsuccessfully ran the ball up the middle a few plays in a row.

“Why are they going up the middle?” she asked. “All the defensive players are there.”

It did not occur to her that those defensive players can move side to side. She figured if the running back decided to run around the end, the 11 defensive players would just stand in the middle like, “Awe, you got us.”

Still, why did they keep calling the same play that did not work?

That is when Kirk and I decided that we needed someone with some common sense with a hotline to the head coach. That person would sit in the “Nacho Booth,” where he or she would watch the game while snacking on food and, possibly, a few beers.

When the coach needed a verbal smack across the head, the person in the booth would buzz down and say something like, “Hey dummy, could you throw the ball on first down for a goof?”

Or, “That receiver can’t catch, so get him out of the game.” Or, “Quit running up the middle. That’s where all the defenders are.”

The beauty of the “Nacho Booth” is that you do not even have to be a football expert to offer some good advice. It might actually be better if you do not know the game all that well. Sometimes the most obvious solutions can come from what others perceive as ignorance.

We saw that with Krik’s friend, who did not have any preconceived notions going into the game.

While that concept might not go over well with most football coaches, it could be exactly what we need to fix our referee crisis in football.

No, I’m not talking about the shortage of football officials because parents like me keep yelling at the men in stripes. I mean the crisis with the NFL football officials who seem to try to ruin every Sunday, Monday and Thursday.

Those calls and silly rules interpretations eventually trickle down to college and high school to ruin our Fridays and Saturdays, too.

Most of that is not on the men and women who are officiating the game. It is more of a problem with the people making and changing the rules each year.

For instance, you never used to hear of a holding penalty on a running play. Now it is called every two or three runs. That is not because players suddenly started holding on runs. It’s because they changed the rules and interpretations.

In the NFL, the most exciting thing that an announcer says is, “no flags.” That is because we are conditioned to expect to see a flag on every big play. If our team scores a touchdown or breaks up a third-down pass, the first thing we do is look and listen to see if there was a penalty on the play.

The NFL needs to decriminalize the playing of football. We could do that be rolling back most of the new rules put in place since the 1980s and ban the type of officials who do party pumps to look good in the size smedium shirts.

Too many of these NFL officials think I paid $400 plus for the NFL Sunday Ticket just so I could watch them make 47 calls into the camera every Sunday.

So, we should incorporate the “Nacho Booth” idea into officiating. We can call it the “Comon-Sense Booth.”

We could take any fan out of Buffalo Wild Wings or the Metals Sports Bar & Grill and give them a direct line to the head official of each game. Of course, it would have to be a fan who has no rooting interest in either team because the Packers already get every call.

It would kind of build on the “expedited review” that you see sometimes in games. It is when an official buzzes down to say, “That was not a completed pass.”

When an official calls a roughing the passer penalty because he barely brushes the helmet of a quarterback — or if he looks at Patrick Mahomes — then the guy in the booth could buzz down and say, “Knock it off. This is football, not Dance Moms.”

If they call a pass interference penalty when it clearly was not pass interference, the booth could buzz down and say, “Overruled.” Then the officials would wave off the flag before the bad call is even announced.

We are talking about the obvious calls that anyone with some common sense could tell you are bad calls. They are the ones that mar the games week after week.

We’re talking about a little tug on the shirt that gave the Chiefs the Super Bowl win. Or the not-so-late hit that gave the Chiefs the Super Bowl win. Or the horrible pass interference call that gave the Chiefs the Super Bowl win.

You do not have to be well versed in football — or even have watched football before — to know that the officials are ruining the NFL. It would not take much of an effort to tell these men and women to knock it off and let the players just play the damn game.

This idea would get rid of those long delays while some official in the home office in New York tries to decide which catch counts as a catch. It would end silly roughing-the-passer calls that would not even be a foul in a basketball game. It would end the phantom pass interference calls.

Adding the “Common-Sense Booth” to NFL games would put an end to so many controversies, and it would mean we could watch games without seeing the officials steal the spotlight all afternoon.

For a lot of us NFL fans, it would mean a lot less yelling at the television and a lot more time spent enjoying the games.

If I didn’t have to yell at the officials all day, I might finally have time to properly explain a first down to my wife.

 — Bill Foley, who actually kind of likes Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 or Bluesky at @foles74.bsky.social. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.